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Rumors of Drug Use Have Damaged for Decades

Barry Bonds may go to jail if a jury believes he lied about using steroids. Many other players could face suspensions next season if George J. Mitchell identifies them in his coming investigative report on steroids in baseball.

But the story of Bonds or any other player doesn’t approach the tale of Babe Dahlgren, a major league first baseman from 1935 to 1946, whose career and life were ruined by an unsubstantiated rumor that he smoked marijuana.

Under Major League Baseball’s drug-testing program today, players get 50-game suspensions for testing positive for steroid use, 25 games for amphetamine use. Dahlgren, whose career ended nearly 60 years before testing began, merely had his life wrecked.

The first player tested for drug use, in 1943, Dahlgren volunteered to be tested, and he underwent a series of examinations by a doctor in Philadelphia to prove he was not a user of marijuana.

This bizarre and sad, heart-rending story is told in a new book, “Rumor in Town” (Woodlyn Lane), by Matt Dahlgren, the player’s 37-year-old grandson, who had promised that he would get to the bottom of the scurrilous talk.

He did, learning that it was started by Joe McCarthy, manager of seven Yankees World Series champions, and propagated by Branch Rickey, father of baseball’s farm system and a brilliant executive.

In this engrossing book, Matt Dahlgren also writes that a succession of baseball commissioners did nothing to help Dahlgren clear his name, starting with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who told him, according to the book, that “castration would be an appropriate punishment for the culprit behind the rumor.”

“Babe would write to Landis every time he heard of someone who heard the rumor, but Landis never did anything,” Matt Dahlgren said Friday in a telephone interview. “Babe wrote to other commissioners, and none of them did anything.”

By the time Fay Vincent took office in 1989, Dahlgren, then 77, had wearied in his pursuit of trying to get a commissioner to help him salvage his reputation.

“It’s too bad; I wish I had been involved,” Vincent said by telephone from Florida. “I would have tried to fix it.”

He added: “People railroaded him for illegitimate reasons. It’s a sad story. He was accused of being on drugs when I doubt very much that he was.”

Vincent, who lauded the book, said, “It’s not one of baseball’s prettiest stories, and I regret that it didn’t get fixed before he died.”

Why did McCarthy start the rumor? With detective-like qualities and using as a guide a manuscript his grandfather wrote, Matt Dahlgren pieced together the story.

It began with a meeting, at the suggestion of James Dawson, who covered the Yankees for The New York Times, between Dahlgren and Lefty O’Doul, an expert hitting instructor, at the wedding of Joe DiMaggio and Dorothy Arnold.

McCarthy, apparently seeing O’Doul as a threat, learned of O’Doul’s hitting help and confronted Dahlgren about it. After that season (1940), McCarthy orchestrated Dahlgren’s trade to the Boston Braves.

At the time, McCarthy explained the trade by saying that Dahlgren’s arms were too short to play first base, even though Dahlgren, who had replaced Lou Gehrig the year before, was widely considered the league’s finest first baseman.

But in a subsequent conversation with “baseball insiders,” McCarthy offered a different reason for the trade, demonstrating his resentment of Dahlgren at the same time. Dahlgren, his grandson quoted McCarthy as saying, would not have made a game-losing error in a late-season game that hurt the Yankees’ pennant chances “if he wasn’t a marijuana smoker.”

Dahlgren did not become aware of the rumor for a couple of years, but it was responsible for a series of moves in his career. In the next two seasons, 1941 and ’42, he played for the Braves, the Cubs, the Browns and the Dodgers. Early in 1943, Dahlgren had an unpleasant salary session with Rickey, a frugal — cheap — general manager.

According to the book, Rickey infuriated Dahlgren by asking, “Do you smoke marijuana?”

Rickey traded Dahlgren to Philadelphia before the season, and during a trip to play the Dodgers, Dahlgren and a teammate, Danny Litwhiler, encountered Charlie Dressen, a former Dodgers coach. Dressen said Rickey was asked by his bosses why he traded Dahlgren, and “Rickey told them he traded you because you smoke marijuana.”

The trail went further. The Phillies traded Dahlgren, who was an All-Star, to Pittsburgh in December 1943. Matt Dahlgren figured it out.

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Ted McGrew had been the Dodgers’ chief scout and attended the meeting at which Rickey cited marijuana as the reason he traded Dahlgren. Bill Cox, the Phillies’ owner, who was about to be barred for life for betting on their games, hired McGrew in October. Two months later Dahlgren was traded.

It was not his final move. In April 1946, the Pirates sold Dahlgren to the St. Louis Browns, his seventh move in six seasons.

In 1985, 11 years before he died, Dahlgren wrote a letter to an old teammate, Al Lopez, asking the name of a scout who Lopez said was present at dinner when the owner of the Indianapolis minor league club told him that Rickey had “gone to great lengths to damage my reputation by saying I smoked marijuana.”

In a handwritten reply, the 77-year-old Lopez told Dahlgren, “The scout’s name was Ted McGrew.”

Split in Israel League

The Israel Baseball League had a successful first season, but its founder may be hard pressed to keep that success going.

Last Thursday, Daniel Kurtzer, the league commissioner and former ambassador to Israel and Egypt, resigned with nine members of the advisory board, including Marvin Goldklang, a limited Yankees partner; Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president; and Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College.

In their letter of resignation, summing up the concerns of all, Goldklang and Zimbalist wrote that “it has become apparent that the business leadership of the league has ceased to perform in an effective, constructive or responsible manner and has failed to manage its capital and other resources in a manner likely to produce successful results.”

Furthermore, they said, the league had not paid some players, managers and umpires.

In a telephone interview, Goldklang added, “The biggest issue was the feeling that trust in the management of the league was compromised.”

The criticism was aimed at Larry Baras, the Boston bagel entrepreneur, who founded the league. Baras was not available Friday, but in a phone interview Martin Berger, a Miami lawyer who is the league president, said: “We are upset and disappointed that they’re leaving, but we are going ahead for next year. We have been talking to people who potentially are going to purchase the teams.”

Dan Duquette, a former major league general manager, will continue to be the league’s baseball operations director.

The advisers who resigned said the league was unwilling to provide financial information.

“They were asking us for things that we didn’t have yet,” Berger said. “We haven’t done our financials for this year.”

Vincent Is Upbeat on Game

Fay Vincent, who as deputy commissioner dealt with the Pete Rose scandal, doesn’t see the Barry Bonds indictment being a problem for baseball.

“I don’t believe it’s a serious blow,” Vincent said. “Baseball is riding very high, in part thanks to Mr. Selig. Clubs are making an enormous amount of money. Baseball will shrug this off without any great harm whatsoever.”

A federal grand jury in San Francisco indicted Bonds the same day that Commissioner Bud Selig announced that major league revenue this year was a record $6.075 billion.

Some people believe the steroids scandal is hurting baseball, but it’s hard to find evidence of that harm in the 2007 record attendance or the record revenue. Selig sees more lucrative days ahead. That’s more than Bonds can say. His lawyers believe the government’s case will fall apart, but they are his lawyers.

The government nevertheless could have a difficult time winning a conviction in San Francisco. That’s Bonds’s town, and a jury could have at least a few big fans who will view things differently from the way prosecutors will portray them.

Recalling the case of Rose, the career hits leader, who was suspended by baseball in 1989 and later convicted of tax evasion, Vincent said federal authorities at the time told him and John Dowd, the Washington lawyer who investigated Rose’s betting, that they would not have indicted Rose on tax charges “if we had not got him first because they didn’t think they could get a jury to convict him.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 82 of the New York edition with the headline: Ruined by Suspicion: The Sad Tale of Babe Dahlgren. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe